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SDL2 Plans With Wayland, SDL3 Already On The Mind

08-14-2013, 12:50 PM

Phoronix: SDL2 Plans With Wayland, SDL3 Already On The Mind

While SDL 2.0 was finally released this week after being in development for years, future SDL 2.x features and changes are already being plotted and even some early thoughts concerning SDL 3.x for game developers and other cross-platform developers relying upon this important Simple DirectMedia Layer library...

So...... this might be a crazy idea...... and I have no idea if this is even possible........ but could someone, if they wanted too, build a whole DE on top of SDL2.0? Since it will support so many different graphics frameworks (Wayland, Mir, Xorg, ect).... could you just write once for SDL2.0 and have it work everywhere?

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So...... this might be a crazy idea...... and I have no idea if this is even possible........ but could someone, if they wanted too, build a whole DE on top of SDL2.0? Since it will support so many different graphics frameworks (Wayland, Mir, Xorg, ect).... could you just write once for SDL2.0 and have it work everywhere?

well prolly not only with SDL since is a layer that rest between graphical server and the toolkits. probably could be done but it will take way more work than just use a proper toolkit with SDL support

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Tiny thing about multiple mouse and keyboard support.
Would like if one application only supports one mouse and keyboard it can deal with multiple ones.
Have SDL only use the mouse keyboard that's last selected for that application be used.
It's flexible, adaptable very convenient.

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So...... this might be a crazy idea...... and I have no idea if this is even possible........ but could someone, if they wanted too, build a whole DE on top of SDL2.0?

In theory, nothing is impossible.

In practice: this is going to be a very tedious task.

Other toolkits (Qt, GTK, ...) are designed with GUI application in mind. They are designed around buttons, menus, forms... and designed to manage multiple windows, dialog boxes, etc. You get all the building blocks for a DE, but not much for a game where you don't care about button, you only want to display things directly on the screen.
SDL is designed with giving low-level access to multimedia hardware in a standard fashion (Think DirectDraw, DirectSound and the various other "Direct-something" parts of DirectX). It's designed around sufaces, blits, frame synchronisation, managing context for OpenGL to render in them, etc. all this to diplayed into a single full-screen application, or maybe a game in windowed mode. Only very recently with SDL can you finally have an application open more than 1 window. You get all the building blocks for a game, but not much for a DE, nor even a GUI App. With SDL , you'll need to actually code from scratch everything that is going to be displayed on screen, and your only reference material and examples are million of... games 2D or 3D engines.

Asking if a DE can be done on SDL is like asking if a DE could be done on OpenGL.

So yes, it's possible, as in : you'll need to code all your button, menus, forms, windows and dialogue boxes from scratch.

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So yes, it's possible, as in : you'll need to code all your button, menus, forms, windows and dialogue boxes from scratch.

You could make them abstract/reusable ... and end up having another toolkit just like GTK or QT. If someone really wanted to do that, he'd better off pushing SDL into QT/GTK as a backend then. It'd be still questionable, whether that makes that much sense ;P

I don't know about the future of X, but if it remains, we'll (probably) have 3 display servers. You might think about an abstraction layer for display servers then ...

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So...... this might be a crazy idea...... and I have no idea if this is even possible........ but could someone, if they wanted too, build a whole DE on top of SDL2.0? Since it will support so many different graphics frameworks (Wayland, Mir, Xorg, ect).... could you just write once for SDL2.0 and have it work everywhere?

What do you mean by build a whole DE on top of SDL? If you mean writing a compositor, then no, compositors don't need the features of SDL to begin with. If you mean assembling a bunch of programs that use SDL, then in theory it's possible, but you'd be hard pressed to find people crazy enough to write GUI apps with SDL. And the result would also be very incoherent, with each application having different looks entirely. It's much more realistic to just add Wayland and Mir backends to all the current GUI toolkits instead.

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So...... this might be a crazy idea...... and I have no idea if this is even possible........ but could someone, if they wanted too, build a whole DE on top of SDL2.0? Since it will support so many different graphics frameworks (Wayland, Mir, Xorg, ect).... could you just write once for SDL2.0 and have it work everywhere?

This isn't the same thing but it might interest you to know that there used to be an X server implementation built on SDL called Xsdl.